Looking for a cheaper getaway? Here are a few suggestions

So you want to travel on a budget. Who doesn’t? Yet it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the cheap travel tips, hacks and strategies out there that promise unbelievable deals on airfare and hotels.

In reality, there’s only one important tactic for traveling cheaply: being flexible with your travel dates, destination and plans. It might sound simple — or even simplistic — but you would be surprised how few travelers are willing to take this piece of advice to heart.

To be fair, this flexibility-first mindset requires a paradigm shift for many in terms of how they start planning vacations. It requires moving from this type of planning:

“I want to go to Amsterdam from Sept. 5th through 13th.”

To this:

“I want to go somewhere fun in September.”

For some, this degree of flexibility is simply impossible. Yet for those who can loosen their preconceptions about how to plan travel, it can lead to big savings — and maybe even more fun — whether you’re paying with cash or using points.

Rigidity is expensive

The cost of travel depends on the interplay between many factors, including demand, supply, randomness, number of options.

When you make specific plans from the get-go, you essentially constrain the last variable — you give yourself fewer options. This means that the cost of your trip will depend entirely on the first three variables, which are completely outside of your control.

This economic interplay will sometimes fall in your favor, and you’ll score a good deal on the exact destination and dates you wanted. But more often than not, you’ll end up paying more than average simply by starting with a severely limited set of options.

Plan with flexibility

You can still set some boundaries around your search. Example parameters might include:

I want to travel in the fall. I want to sit on the beach.

I don’t want to spend more than $X.

From here, you can begin weighing different destinations and dates to see which could be the best for your preferences. For example, you might start with flights to Hawaii, but notice that airfare is through the roof. So you switch to the Caribbean,

narrow your interest to a few destinations with cheap flights, then start researching hotel prices.

Finally, you can find the dates and destinations that offer the best combination of price and features, then book your travel.

The right tools

As this flexible travel approach gains in popularity, travel booking sites and services have begun offering helpful tools specifically designed for the task.

Airfare alerts

Airfare deal newsletters, like Scott’s Cheap Flights and Dollar Flight Club, are how many travelers start thinking in terms of flexibility. These newsletters send a blast to subscribers whenever they discover a low-cost airfare deal.

But there’s usually a catch:

These airfare deals are available only on certain dates, or to very specific destinations. You can’t sit around waiting for a great deal from Atlanta to Sydney, because that may not come around in time.

But you can wait for an exciting fare from Atlanta to … somewhere, and jump on it when it becomes available.

Points and miles

Travel bloggers love to rave about how they scored a first-class ticket using miles, but they don’t often describe their true secret: extreme flexibility.

Redeeming points and miles for reward travel all but requires a high degree of flexibility to get the most value from them. If you’re looking to use miles on a specific flight on a specific day, you might either pay too much — or not be able to score a ticket at all.